Stop foreign language spam with message rules

Q: I’m getting sp am emails from foreign countries. I can’t even read them! How can I stop these?

A:This is actually one of the easiest kinds of junk mail to handle, and you don’t even need any extra software to do it! Since most of us are unlikely to want to receive any email in foreign languages, you can set up a message rule to keep them out of your inbox without much fear of losing wanted emails.

Before we get started, I’d just like to tell all the web-based email users to read the directions here and then look for a similar message rules option on your webmail page. If you can’t find it, look at this list of webmail help and support pages.

The Message Rules window will appear. You might want to take this opportunity to look through what rules you already have in place. When editing a message rule, I always copy and paste the existing version into a word processing document so that I can change everything back if necessary.

To get rid of the foreign language emails, click the New button.

The New Mail Rule window will appear. Select Where the message body contains specific words for your condition and Delete it for your action.

Name your rule something like Foreign Letter1, Foreign Letter2, etc. Click OK. Create 2 or 3 similar message rules with a different character each time. That should take care of your foreign junk mail woes!